Opposition voiced to NY radio tower

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Proposed construction of a new FM radio tower has some Beekmantown, NY residents upset, according to a Press Republican story there. Independent Tower and Wireless Corp., a Delaware company represented by applicant Ed Flanagan of Montpelier, VT, has applied for special-use and conditional-use permits in a Residential-2 area. The permits would allow the corporation to build a 110-foot guy-wired lattice tower on the 99-acre Bear Town Ski Area. The tower would at 102.7 MHz and provide service for the Emergency Alert System and the Amber Alert System for New York and Vermont.


Members of the West Beekmantown Neighborhood Association opposed the application at the recent Town Council meeting. An association took issue with the application calling the tower an "essential service."
However, the radio tower is not controlled by the zoning law but by telecommunications law, regulated by local law No. 1 of 2002, which states the towers can be built in R-2 zones under the law and have been before. The law lists 10 possible sites for telecommunications, giving the R-2 area as a lower priority choice, however.

"Significant effort was invested to identify a site for the proposed FM radio tower in the Beekmantown area," according to the visual-impact assessment conducted by engineering firm DuBois and King. "Other sites were considered. "The proposed Beartown Ski Area was selected because it met the broadcast technical requirement and because the site is the less visually intrusive. The site is located more than 900 feet from the nearest publicly traveled roadway, Beartown Road," the story quoted.